This started as an entry about New Year’s Resolutions. Half way through struggling to find time to write it and after accidentally loosing the little I had actually managed to write, I realized this might not be the best time to set resolutions. There are limits to how much you can get done while spending most of your day and night pacing around the living room and doing squats trying to ease the pain of a crying infant.

Our dear little Jónatan has infant colic and is in a lot of pain. It is dreadful to see your little one in so much pain and not knowing what to do to help him. The general response from doctors is “it will pass”. The regular recommended remedies have no effect so all you can do is wait… and do squats as those do help a bit.

I am carrying him large parts of the day and he sleeps on me at night. Not much alone time in other words. The few moments I am free of him I am rushing around trying to get something to eat, shower and doing all the things that are difficult to do with him hanging on me. I am stressing that nothing is done well enough and I am not doing anything that I really want to do. The few times I actually do something I am not satisfied with the result. It is not like this is a new problem to me but recent events have made it more obvious.

So in 2015 I am gonna work on intensively on one principle and that is the Good Enough principle. Try to lower my standards a bit and just be happy with things that are good enough.

I am wrapping up the last craft project of 2014 under this principle. I would have wanted to redo this project and change few things but due to the circumstances I declared it finished and Silja, Jónatan and me gave it as a late Christmas present to their dad. A beanie with their hand prints in reflective heat transfer.

The dad with his beanie

This is not a full blown tutorial but some “Good Enough” quick guidelines in case you want to give it a try with your Silhouette machine. This tutorial assumes you have some experience with tracing and cutting from before. Would make an excellent Father’s Day or Mother’s Day gift!

1. I sewed a beanie according to this tutorial (in Swedish) and with some good help from friends on how to adapt it to other sizes. In short, use the beanie/hat pattern of your own choice. I used Kaufman Laguna Jersey in Aqua.
2. Painted the hands of my kids with hand paint and made hand prints on a piece of paper. Note: this was not easy with an infant so it had to be done in his (deep) sleep.
3. I scanned in the hand prints when dry. You should fill in the hand prints completely with a dark color (keeping the outlines in tact) before scanning them in to make the tracing easier. I used Photoshop to remove background noise and then Silhouette Live Trace in Illustrator to make them into silhouettes but this will probably take longer

Handprints with paint and after filling it with color

4. Use The Silhouette Studio software to trace the outlines and then cut the reflective heat transfer. I had to up the knive to 4 to get it to cut through the heat transfer I used from GladaGrodan (be warned: their shipping is slow).
5. Peel and iron the hand printso onto the front of the beanie.

Taken with flash to show that it is reflective